Why is steampunk such an easy genre to fuck up?Also steam punk general I guess
Why is steampunk such an easy genre to fuck up?Also steam punk general I guess
Carter Price
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Joseph Mitchell
Most people forget the punk part.
Gabriel Evans
Because dipshits without an ounce of STEM savvy or intelligent imagination think brass, cogs and British is how you fabricate an entire setting around alternative technology.
I was at a con once though, and a booth babe in the same tastless garb slipped a steampunk gala pass into my back pocket, giving me a parting pinch and giggling.
Good times.
Tyler Bennett
>Because dipshits without an ounce of STEM savvy or intelligent imagination think brass, cogs and British is how you fabricate an entire setting around alternative technology.
Pretty much this.
Most people just use Steampunk as an aesthetic. The only story I can think of that actually makes a point about it as part of the world is Girl Genius.
Probably one of the few things that setting does right: the technology is all weird and coggy because the power players are all fucking bugnuts insane, they just also happen to be mechanical geniuses. There's no logical progression to their inventions because it's as much random inspiration as it is actual intelligence on their part (and a very loose hand with physics). There's also a staggered, uneven technological progress because technologies are lost and rediscovered at random since none of the geniuses like to talk to each other, or they destroy their notes as soon as an usurper is around the corner, which explains why not everyone is living in mechanical luxury since tech keeps being discovered, lost, reinvented, destroyed, and then found again.
Blake Mitchell
You're quite the master baiter.
Nolan Bell
/thread
Juan Young
bump, i guess
Ryan Perez
Juan King
It's not that the genre is easy to fuck up, it's that the fucked-up version somehow became the popular version, and everyone went with that version because it was all they saw.
Alexander Wilson
I also think the people behind GG just straight up say "this isn't steampunk; we're calling it 'gaslamp fantasy' because it's a lot more not!magic than steam-tech."
A lot can be forgiven if you're just honest with people. If Ubisoft released a game titled "Buggy Tower-Climbing Simulator 2017," they probably wouldn't get so much hate.
Henry Morgan
a lot of anons have already given plenty of good answers to your question OP, but consider that on top of all of that, there's not really any set few steampunk works.
what I mean by that is there where anyone who wants to do cyberpunk has a plethora of material to use, from bladerunner to shadowrun to robocop, and it's all within easy reach. naming an influential steampunk work is much much harder to do, since there's never really been a solid hit that incorporated the genre/style. without reference material, everyone ends up coming to different conclusions by different means, and so instead of the semi-cohesive idea that comes to mind when you think of cyberpunk (generally dystopian futures, megacorporations, gene modding, cybernetic implants, and high technology), you basically think of brass, cogs, steam, and british. it's the same reason none of the other various '___punk's get anywhere. nobody's been successful enough to pioneer a framework for everyone else to work off, so all the hacks have free reign
what you see is basically a collective failure of everyone interested in the idea to produce a noteworthy work to define that idea.
John Sanders
How exactly do you fuck up steam punk?
Everyone has their own opinion on what steam punk "really is"
And practically every asshole that claims to know what it "really is" goes full on reeeeeee about some superficial or conversely overthought bull shit.
James Collins
It's been said before but they forget why punk is there and make it cogfop instead.
Michael Rogers
Because steampunk is an aesthetic/theme while cogfop is a ready-made setting. 1880s upper class London complete with fake accents and literally everyone being an aristocrat except for some lost Oliver Twist-like poor boy, just add cogs.
This is why the best Steampunk author predates the term "steampunk" by a century: Jules Verne. That's because the man actually applied the mindset steampunk should have: how do we do [crazy shit] with 1800s technology in a way that may not be possible but is at the very least plausible? Sticking cogs on your hat or a fully-functional rifle does not fucking help.
For all of its flaws in story and pacing, Kabaneri is IMHO a pretty interesting Japanese take on steampunk in terms of aesthetics. Their crazy cogfop guns also have a reason to exist because they do the one thing normal guns can't: kill kabane.
Juan Powell
I have a guilty love of cogfop though.
Grayson Ramirez
Lack of good "universal" movies/books to rely on.
There is a lot of space opera that is shit, and tons of space opera better than Star Wars, but we all know those movies and like them Sets the tone, the conventiosn, the expections nicely, at least as a base.
So, yup.
Ian Young
What's cogfop exactly?
Elijah Gomez
The very thing this () laments.
Aaron Miller
Generally: aping the aesthetics of Steampunk without caring about the other parts of the genre. Especially if you look flamboyant while you're doing it.
Specifically: glue gears onto your top hat! Now glue more gears onto those gears! Now throw some random plumbing fixtures on it! Oh, you have a pocket watch? How about SEVEN pocket watches!!! Your eyepatch is a pocket watch!!!! Now hit the whole thing with an entire can of metallic copper spraypaint!!!!!
Juan Butler
Too stuck up with cogs, victorianism, and punkism, not stuck up enough with futurism using old technology.
One of the best steampunk games I've played was hammerfight, a game about using shitty airships to hit giant bugs and robots with hammers.
Isaiah Bell
alright, so whats the problem with a purely aesthetic setting?
its just paint for your adventure after all
Adrian Hill
Nothing other than hipsterism and anti-hipster hipsterism.
basically, the hipsters got it, so now the mega hipsters have to shit on it.
Aaron Perez
>its just paint for your adventure after all
This is precisely the problem. The kind of storytelling I consider aesthetic is cohesive and consequent. If the paint tears, it shouldn't be there in the first place.
Of course, both hipsters doing cogfoppery and antihipsterhipsters like op doing nothing but to whine about it are equally overseeing the narrative potential of the movement. So let's derrail this thread and actually talk about uchronias and technomagics and Victorian fantasies.